Somewhere along the road from Washington to Broadway, the Kennedy Center production of “Follies” picked up a pulse. A vigorous heart now beats at the center of this revitalized revival of James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim’s 1971 musical, which opened on Monday night at the Marquis Theater. And though the subject is the ghosts of show business past, don’t expect gentle nostalgia. This “Follies” looks back as much in anger as in fondness. That’s what makes it so vibrant.

Set in a decaying theater that once housed the Ziegfeld-style Weismann musical revues, “Follies” asks us to measure the warping weight of three decades upon the onetime Weismann performers who reunite “for a final chance to glamorize the old days,” as one character says. But there’s another, happier computation to consider. That’s the changes wrought not by 30 years but by three or four months.

Photo

Follies Jan Maxwell in this revival of James Goldman and Stephen Sondheim's 1971 musical, at the Marquis Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

As directed by Eric Schaeffer, “Follies” seemed sleepy and slow when I caught it in Washington in May. Though it perked up in its second act, much of the production felt unfocused and unresolved. Two of its stars, Jan Maxwell and Danny Burstein, were excellent, but you had to question some of the other casting choices. Bernadette Peters, that eternally blooming rose of the American theater, as a faded, dowdy housewife? The hearty Ron Raines as a high-strung businessman on the verge of a nervous breakdown?

I am happy to report that since then, Ms. Peters has connected with her inner frump, Mr. Raines has found the brittle skeleton within his solid flesh, and Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Burstein have only improved. Two new additions to the cast, Jayne Houdyshell and Mary Beth Peil, are terrific. This production has taken on the glint of crystalline sharpness. If it still has a few soft spots, it is by and large a taut creation, one that finds a white-hot here and now in the shadows of lost time.

When the original “Follies” opened in 1971, it was very much of its time and a breathtaking departure. Broadway was then specializing in nostalgic musicals (like “No, No, Nanette”) and dramas of middle-aged disenchantment (paging Edward Albee) — a dichotomy appropriate to the sour years of Vietnam and Watergate. “Follies” took on both sides of the equation. And Goldman’s book and especially Mr. Sondheim’s songs captured an almost pathological tension between the two.

Photo

Ron Raines, center, as Benjamin Stone, a celebrated Manhattan executive, in a revival of the James Goldman-Stephen Sondheim musical “Follies,” which opened on Monday.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

The producer Dimitri Weismann (David Sabin) is giving a farewell party for the grand old theater, about to be razed for a parking lot, where his Follies were staged between the World Wars. Among his guests: two former showgirls and their husbands (who were once their stage-door Johnnies). The witheringly droll and elegant Phyllis (Ms. Maxwell) is married to Benjamin Stone (Mr. Raines), a celebrated Manhattan executive, while Sally (Ms. Peters) has settled down in the Midwest with Buddy Plummer (Mr. Burstein), a salesman.

“I wanted something when I came here 30 years ago,” says Phyllis, as she arrives, “but I forgot to write it down, and God knows what it was.” A similar curiosity, both fearful and hopeful, would seem to possess everyone at the reunion. And as the former Follies folk — who include an aging movie star played to the comic hilt by the British musical star Elaine Paige — tentatively perform their old routines, the sequined and plumed phantoms of their past selves hover nearby.

In the second act Phyllis, Ben, Buddy and Sally sing and dance out their wintry discontents in fantasy sequences that use clashing form and content to parallel the differences between cheery then and somber now. (Derek McLane’s set captures the contrasts with flair and efficiency.)

Photo

Lora Lee Gayer, left, as the young Sally, and Bernadette Peters as the older Sally, in "Follies."Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Directed by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett — and staged with a sumptuousness that would be unthinkable today — the 1971 “Follies” was Broadway’s ultimate ghost story, steeped in a hungry and shimmering darkness. In Mr. Schaeffer’s version neither the ghosts nor the darkness loom as large. Though gorgeously costumed by Gregg Barnes, the spectral showgirls don’t really seem to know why they’re there. And Mr. Carlyle’s period choreography, though often charming, lacks the grandeur and precision of Bennett’s.

Where this “Follies” excels is in its psychological portraiture and character-defining use of Mr. Sondheim’s intricately layered songs. (James Moore is the sensitive musical director.) Though few of the performers are natural pastiche artists, they evoke enough of yesteryear’s modes and moods to suggest that they’ve been around. And they skillfully illuminate the tug of war — between youth and age, optimism and cynicism — that swirls within Mr. Sondheim’s score.

That tension surfaces most benignly in the showstopping “Who’s That Woman,” in which the former Weismann Girls, led by a first-rate Terri White, recreate an old production number. Watch their faces as they go though nearly forgotten paces, embracing, and recoiling from, the blithe young things they once were.

Video

Bernadette Peters: Ghosts of ‘Follies’

The actress talks about playing Sally in the Broadway revival of the musical "Follies."

The great first-act trio of musical routines — an addled misfire in Washington — now registers as a moving counterpoint of attitudes: the starry-eyed rapture of Susan Watson (Kim in the original “Bye Bye Birdie”) and Don Correia as a veteran soft-shoe team; the purring, knowing self-exploitation of Ms. Peil as a French chanteuse who now makes her living in perfume; and the sublime, self-delighted feistiness of Ms. Houdyshell as the weathered but enduring singer of “Broadway Baby.”

Not all the characters are similarly at ease with what they have become, and they fail to heed the show’s central admonition, “Never look back” (touchingly sung here by Rosalind Elias with Viennese-operetta flourishes). As Ms. Paige performs “I’m Still Here” — with a galvanizing fierceness that makes this much-performed song sound fresh and stinging — it’s not just an anthem of survival but also of rage against ravaging time.

A performance-honing anger defines each of the four central characters too. Ms. Peters, who in Washington looked entirely too sexy to be Sally, now has the eloquently crestfallen aspect of a woman who’s almost given up on life but sees the glimmer of a last chance. The new wig and dress help to play down her natural radiance, but it’s the fractured quality in her singing voice (most affectingly deployed in the torchy “Losing My Mind”) and line readings that puts across the character as someone for whom resentment is sliding into madness.

Video

Excerpt: 'Follies'

An excerpt from the number "Who's That Woman" from the Broadway revival of "Follies." (Video courtesy of the production.)

Mr. Burstein does his best work to date as the chatty, glad-handing Buddy, whose disappointment chills his every smile. His fantasy number, “Buddy’s Blues,” becomes a blistering diatribe against unshakable ambivalence. And Mr. Raines, though saddled with some of Goldman’s more tedious “smart” dialogue, exudes the fever-pitched heartiness you see in politicians just before their careers crash.

As for Ms. Maxwell, she gets better every time I see her. Her Phyllis (the part for which Alexis Smith won a Tony) is the show’s most dazzling embodiment of someone trying both to reclaim and to move beyond her receding past. Her “Could I Leave You?,” Phyllis’s lacerating assertion of independence to her husband, overflows with both tenderness and hostility.

You see, the girl who fell in love with Ben still lurks anxiously beneath the glossy veneer that Phyllis has since acquired. The younger selves of Phyllis, Ben, Sally and Buddy are dexterously incarnated here by Kirsten Scott, Nick Verina, Lora Lee Gayer and Christian Delcroix. But they’re almost superfluous. The four stars of this “Follies” give X-ray performances, in which lives past and souls divided can be seen clearly beneath the skin. Like Mr. Sondheim’s music, they make harmony out of the jangling contradictions that come with being alive.

Related Coverage

When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed play or musical through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. But our primary goal is that this feature adds value to your reading experience.